Emotionally Weird(6)

I woke up with a jolt. My head had been pillowed uncomfortably on the edge of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the book had left a painful gouge in my cheek. Terri was making little whimpering noises, dreaming about chasing rabbits again.

I shook her awake, ‘Come on, we’re going to be late.’

My new resolution, rather late in my final year I realized, was to attend all the lectures, tutorials and seminars that I was supposed to. This was in a vain bid to curry favour with as many of the English department staff as possible because I was now so behind with my work that it was becoming increasingly unlikely that I would even be able to sit my degree, let alone pass it. I didn’t understand how I’d got so behind with everything, especially when I was trying so hard to keep up.

Terri was even more behind than I was, if that was possible. The George Eliot essay ( ‘ Middlemarch is a treasure house of detail, but an indifferent whole.’ Can Middlemarch be defended against this criticism by Henry James? ) was just one of the many pieces of work that we hadn’t managed to do.

I dressed as if for a polar expedition in as many clothes as I could find – woollen tights, a long needlecord pinafore dress, several reject men’s golfing sweaters that had been acquired in a St Andrews Woollen Mill sale, scarf, gloves, knitted hat, and, lastly, an old beaver coat, bought for ten shillings in the pawn shop at the West Port, a coat that still had a comforting old lady smell of camphor and violet cachous about it.

‘Ontological proof,’ Bob shouted mysteriously in his sleep – a concept he wouldn’t even know the meaning of if he was awake.

Terri grimaced and replaced her sunglasses and pulled on a black beret so that now she looked like a deranged governess engaged in guerrilla warfare. A Weathergirl.

‘Let’s do it,’ she said, and we slipped out into the shock of a morning that crackled with cold so that every time we spoke our breath came out in cold white clouds like the speech bubbles in the Beano . We trudged up Paton’s Lane and as we turned onto the Perth Road, the invisible, ever-watchful pair of eyes monitored our progress.

‘Maybe it’s the eye of God,’ Terri said. I was sure God, if he existed at all, which was highly unlikely, would have better things to do with his time than watch me.

‘Maybe he doesn’t,’ Terri said. ‘Maybe he’s like a really . . . trivial guy. Who knows?’ Who indeed.





The Art of Structuralist Criticism





‘ BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, ’ ARCHIE SAID. (OR SOMETHING LIKE that.) Ten minutes after eleven in Archie McCue’s room on the third floor of the extension to Robert Matthews’ soaring sixties’ Tower – the Queen’s Tower, although no queen was ever likely to live in it. The gloomy atmosphere was made gloomier by the absence of electricity. A candle, stuck in an empty Blue Nun bottle, burned at the window like a signal. The university was still managing to run its heating although no-one knew how – perhaps they were burning books, or (more likely) students. The room was hot and airless and I had to peel off my layers of reject golfing sweaters, one by one.

Archie was talking. Nothing will stop Archie talking, not even death probably, he will rumble on from the inside of his large coffin until the worms get fed up with the noise and eat his tongue –

‘ When words no longer strive for mimesis they become dislocated and disconnected. They illustrate in themselves the exhaustion of forms. Writers who eschew mimesis, looking for new ways of approaching the fiction construct, are disruptivist – challenging what Robbe-Grillet refers to as the “intelligibility of the world”. ’ Archie paused. ‘What do you think of that statement? Anyone?’ No-one answered. No-one ever had any idea what Archie was talking about.

Archie’s blimpish body strained to escape from his dark green polyester shirt, a shirt stained at the armpits with large damp triangles of sweat. He was also attired in brown trousers and a tan-coloured knitted tie that sported a different quality of stain – dried boiled egg-yolk, or custard.

He spun round in his tweedy, executive chair, so much more comfortable than the chairs assigned to his tutees – the little faux wood tables attached to our chairs seemed to be specifically designed to restrain us, like a cross between a baby’s high chair and an asylum straitjacket. The chairs were made from some artificial material – a hard grey plastic substance that the university seemed over fond of. It was only possible to be even remotely comfortable in these chairs for a maximum of ten minutes. An unfettered Archie, on the other hand, was free to birl and twirl around like a fairground ride on his Easy-glide castors.